Seven Ways to Bust Your IT Budget

Seven Ways to Bust Your IT Budget

Perform a cost-benefit analysis for each application to determine whether a move to the cloud makes sense.

Companies overspent by more than $207 billion on technology and telecom purchases last year, according to NPI, a consulting firm specializing in the management of IT spending. Many enterprises were dealing with budgets that had been slashed during the Great Recession, even as new projects were expected to drive the innovation necessary for growth. “It was essential to align IT with business demands, but it was like walking a tightrope,” says Gregg Spivack, director of client services at NPI, who developed this list for Baseline. “While some companies kept their balance, others took quite a fall.” Some common mistakes contributed to the huge overages, he says, while companies also were forced to deal with big trends shaping enterprise technology spending. Just sticking with the status quo won’t work any longer; business must be aggressive about finding savings, while resisting the temptation to follow the pack on trendy technologies if a specific investment can’t be justified on cost and ROI.

Ed Cone has worked as a contributing editor at Wired, a staff writer at Forbes, a senior writer for Ziff Davis with Baseline and Interactive Week, and as a freelancer based in Paris and then North Carolina for a wide variety of magazines and papers including the International Herald Tribune, Texas Monthly, and Playboy. He writes an opinion column in his hometown paper, the Greensboro News & Record, and publishes the semi-popular EdCone.com weblog. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, Lisa, two kids, and a dog.